Lifeboat Foundation

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, by the United States in August 1945 was not only devastating at the time, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, but it has had long-standing impacts to the present day, particularly the elevated incidence of cancer from radiation.

Continued research of Hiroshima Bay has uncovered a new kind of debris from the fallout, known as Hiroshima glasses. These formed from vaporized materials of the bomb and the surrounding landscape and infrastructure being targeted.

New research published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters has analyzed the chemical and isotopic compositions of these glasses to ascertain their formation process during the nuclear event.

Artificial intelligence could bring about “biological conflict,” said former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who co-chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

Schmidt spoke with defense reporters Sept. 12 as he helped release a new paper from his tech-oriented nonprofit think tank, the Special Competitive Studies Project. Schmidt launched the think tank with staff from the commission in order to continue the commission’s work.

AI’s applicability to biological warfare is “something which we don’t talk about very much,” Schmidt said, but it poses grave risks. “It’s going to be possible for bad actors to take the large databases of how biology works and use it to generate things which hurt human beings,” Schmidt said, calling that risk “a very near-term concern.”

After a recent car crash, John Murray-Bruce wished he could have seen the other car coming. The crash reaffirmed the USF assistant professor of computer science and engineering’s mission to create a technology that could do just that: See around obstacles and ultimately expand one’s line of vision.

Using a single photograph, Murray-Bruce and his doctoral student, Robinson Czajkowski, created an algorithm that computes highly accurate, full-color three-dimensional reconstructions of areas behind obstacles—a concept that can not only help prevent car crashes but help law enforcement experts in hostage situations search-and-rescue and strategic military efforts.

“We’re turning ordinary surfaces into mirrors to reveal regions, objects, and rooms that are outside our line of vision,” Murray-Bruce said. “We live in a 3D world, so obtaining a more complete 3D picture of a scenario can be critical in a number of situations and applications.”

A team of researchers has won funding from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research to address the challenges posed by silicon spin qubits.

Recent technological advances have enabled the development of increasingly sophisticated sensors, which can help to advance the sensing capabilities of robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, and other smart systems. Many of these sensors, however, rely on individual cameras, thus the accuracy of the measurements they collect is limited by the cameras’ field of view (FOV).

Researchers at Beihang University in China recently developed a new multi-camera differential binocular vision sensor with a wider FOV that could collect more accurate measurements. This sensor, introduced in a paper published in Optics & Laser Technology, could be integrated into a wide range of devices and smart robotic systems.

“Aiming at the high-precision requirements of environment perception for unmanned aerial vehicle detection, robot navigation, and autonomous driving, inspired by the multi-camera module of mobile phones, we introduced a visual perception mode based on the principle of high-precision binocular vision measurement,” Fuqiang Zhou, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “This principle involves a central high-resolution camera and peripheral auxiliary cameras that work together.”

The UK’s high-powered DragonFire laser weapon just shot down its first drones — bringing it one step closer to the battlefield.

When the Chicxulub impactor, a six-mile-wide asteroid, struck Earth 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs had no warning.

If an asteroid that size hit Earth today, a shock wave two million times more powerful than a hydrogen bomb would flatten forests and trigger tsunamis. A seismic pulse equal to a magnitude 10 earthquake would crumble cities.

And long after the impact, a cloud of hot dust, ash, and steam would blot out the sun, plunging the Earth into freezing cold.

New plasma stealth device targets specific areas, not entire aircraft.

Chinese scientists develop plasma stealth device, hiding military aircraft from radar, focusing on shielding specific areas, potentially changing stealth technology.

EpiSci has won a $1.6 million contract with the US Space Development Agency to flesh out its AI-powered, hypersonic missile tracking system.

The SDA and EpiSci have partnered to create AI software that detects hypersonic missiles using satellite technology, AI, and advanced analytics.